Hal Niedzviecki in The Globe and Mail explores whether fans and fandom (or, at least, WorldCon fans) are becoming more conservative and backward-looking. The report:

A genre in a time warp. The weird thing about sci-fi fans gathered in Toronto for their world convention is how focused they are on the past -- odd for a group famous for changing the present by predicting the future

I have to confess that I often think of fandom as quite left-wing and future-oriented and future-concerned, which is played out at events like Borderlands, but then again, the wider fandom even in little old Perth certainly has more conservative voices which are more apparent at the more populus Swancon.

The Penguin Strikes Again

It seems that Microsoft might be going the way of the Dodo for Telstra after recent successful tests of Linux. Australian IT reports:

Telstra, Australia's largest technology company, has nailed its colours firmly to the mast of open source software, creating a potential nightmare for Microsoft and sending shivers through a range of traditional platform providers. Under Project Firefly, Telstra switched on a desktop trial in March using two flavours of Linux and a Citrix-based Windows system, aimed at shifting up to 85 per cent of its computing desktops to thin-client technology.

Perhaps the Microsoft/Monopoly is finally showing some real cracks ...

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After almost four years of constant blogging, the last post to Ponderance (this blog) was made on March 11, 2007. These archives will remain live indefinitely (or until Google starts deleting inactive blogs), but please update your links and come and visit my new blog at Tama Leaver dot Net.

Tama Leaver

I teach in the Department on Internet Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. I blog, I teach, I research, I tweet, and a few other things, too ...

Everything you want to know about me (and that I want to share) can be found at tamaleaver.net.